Day 13 – Content Storage For Raku Distributions

The S22 Content Storage speculation describes how Raku distributions could be stored and accessed by a (possibly federated) Raku ecosystem. The content-storage repository contains an implementation of that speculation, implemented using the Cro framework.

This blog post gives a quick overview of the functionalities that are provided by the web-service that is provided by the content-storage distribution, as well as a command-line interface to it using the API exposed by the web-service.

A few steps need to be taken before one can start storing and installing Raku distributions (as shown in this diagram):

First a storage service is needed where users can register and upload their distributions. This is the role the content-storage distribution is designed to fulfill.

Secondly a Recommendation Manager (a service that translates a “raw” request for a module or certain type of functionality to a distribution package at a content storage location) can be configured to search multiple content-storages and recommend distributions for package managers to install.

Web Interface

An idea of how such a web interface can look:

Once a content-storage service is running, one can register a new user or use default credentials user: admin password: admin to login. There is also an online demo content-storage instance available if you want to try out the content-storage features and you don’t want to go through the installation process of the content-storage distribution.

Adding a distribution

Distributions can be added by simply dragging them into the web interface of the content-storage.

To be allowed to add a distribution, the META auth field must match the storage name and the logged-in user name. And the distribution archive must have the META6.json file in the root directory of the archive with the proper configuration.

A test command can be specified in the configuration and that command will be run to test the distribution before adding it to the storage. For example if App::Prove6 distribution is installed, one can specify prove6 -I. t in test.command config to test the distribution.

View Distribution

After an upload, the documentation of the uploaded distribution can be inspected using the web interface:

Searching the content-storage

Administration

Users with administration rights can delete distributions or builds, and manage users.

Command-line interface

The content-storage-cli Raku module (installable through zef) provides a CLI interface to a content-storage instance using the API exposed by the web-service:

For instance, to list available distributions:

or to list available build results:

The command line interface also allows uploading distributions:

All in all, this gives a person or organization the tools to build their own trusted Raku ecosystem!

(Thanks to Elizabeth Mattijsen for editing the post and adding better explanation.)

Thank you for reading!